Nicole Novak

Hispanic Studies Distinction Portfolio

April 2008

Reflective Essay

Last summer, I worked as a Migrant Health Aide at clinics for Mexican and Texan migrant agricultural workers in my home state of Iowa. Health education was one of my primary responsibilities, and I spoke with every patient who came to our mobile clinic about preventive health practices such as tooth brushing and cancer detection self-exams. Despite my familiarity with the Spanish language, I began to wonder whether I was effectively communicating health information to the patients. While my faith in preventive health care was grounded in a health-obsessed culture and fifteen years of formal education, many of the people I was speaking to had only a few years of school and had grown up with very different understandings of human health. As I tried to imagine how I could respectfully and effectively communicate health information so it would make sense to people of a different background, I often wished that I better understood the patients’ attitudes and perceptions of health and health care. I credit my experiences as a Hispanic Studies major with opening my eyes to this often-overlooked aspect of health and development efforts. While my studies in other departments such as Statistics and Spanish have focused on the mastery of a single subject, the interdisciplinary nature of Hispanic Studies has helped me and humbled me by revealing the subjectivity of my own perspective, both as a student and as an American.

While I have learned a great deal in my academic studies of the Hispanic World, having studied the same region through a variety of disciplines has helped me become aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. My experience in Economics 242, Economics of Development, is a good example of how Hispanic Studies heightened my awareness of the way separate disciplines can characterize the same issue in dramatically different ways. Having spent the previous semester in Central America, I chose to focus on El Salvador’s economy for my final report. In Central America, I had heard many criticisms of El Salvador’s efforts to increase international trade and attract foreign investment. I had heard these arguments from anti-globalization activists, but I had also read many thoroughly researched academic works that came to the same conclusion. Usually arguing from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology or political science, scholars would contend that these policies were earning profits only for a few elites, while the poor who were moving to the cities for these jobs were suffering exploitation for low pay. In El Salvador, these arguments had made sense to me. However, as I studied development economics and researched my final report back in Northfield, I read works by other scholars who celebrated El Salvador’s willingness to open its economy and pointed out that foreign investors had created thousands of jobs and that the country’s decision to dollarize its currency had stabilized the economy. As I worked through my research, I found myself reconsidering some of the policies that I had denounced only a few months before, but I also identified other economic arguments that I found questionable, such as using GDP alone to characterize the health of an economy, or heavily prioritizing the industrial sector over the agricultural sector. Studying El Salvador’s economy from an interdisciplinary perspective helped me to develop a more nuanced understanding of economic development.

My personal experiences as a Hispanic Studies major have also enhanced my understanding of the Hispanic World and reminded me that it takes more than academic study to truly understand a place. Before I left for my semester in Central America, I read several books about the countries I would live in, thinking that it would give me a head start in understanding the places I was to visit. While the political and historical information I gathered was important knowledge to have prior to my trip, once I arrived I lived with several different families and found that the perspectives of Central Americans often challenged my assumptions about the value of academic perspectives to addressing the complexities of development. Pedro, a Maya priest, laughed about the UN population experts who admonished his community for their tradition of having “too many” children, and Noé, a Nicaraguan whose community suffered high rates of kidney failure, lamented the fact that the foreign doctors who visited his community prescribed inaccessible and unaffordable treatments. These experiences instilled in me a deeper understanding of the limitations of academic study in attaining true understanding of a group of people or a place. Prior to my trip, I had always put great faith in formal education, but Central Americans reminded me that academic study cannot replace personal experience, and that there is great danger in overlooking the perspectives of others.

The opportunities that have provided me with the richest understanding of the Hispanic World have been the times when I’ve been able to integrate my personal experiences with my academic studies. I was lucky enough to be in Nicaragua during the presidential elections of 2006, and this provided an excellent opportunity to incorporate my personal reflections into my political science course on political participation in Nicaragua. After having attending lectures and reading articles about Nicaragua’s political environment and Nicaraguan perspectives on political participation, my classmates and I all spoke with our host families about their understanding of the upcoming election. Our conversations with our families could hardly be considered “academic”. We just spoke with our family members as individuals and we didn’t follow any established procedure or try to account for biases. However, when we were able to draw connections between our families’ perspectives and the broader trends we had studied, it brought our whole academic study to life. For me, my conversation with my family gave me a better understanding of the concept of political apathy. I asked both my host mother and my host sister about the degree to which they thought this election would change things in Nicaragua. While my host sisters were optimistic, my host mother, Doña Yelba, just shook her head and said “Nicole, he vivido tantas cosas”—“I have lived through so much.” I had read an article called “The Depoliticization of Society” which described a process by which citizens no longer expect the government to address their family’s needs, and Yelba’s response helped me understand that concept. She had provided for herself and her family under a variety of political circumstances, and she would continue to do so regardless of her country’s political leadership. This integration of my academic study and personal experiences gave me a much richer understanding than either element alone.

Studying the Hispanic World through several academic disciplines and in a variety of settings has given me a complex, although not entirely comprehensive, understanding of the political, social, and economic dynamics of the Hispanic World. While it has made me aware of my own limitations as a scholar, this experience has also humbled me by reminding me that my own cultural background, as someone who is not from the Hispanic World, is not a neutral or infallible perspective. This realization has certainly played a role in my decision to study Medical Anthropology as I prepare myself for a career in public health. Hispanic Studies has convinced me that a sound awareness of the others’ perspectives is essential to the effective and ethical practice of public health.

James E. McBride’s (Class ’07) Reflective Essay of his Distinction Work for Hispanic Studies. 

“The reflective essay should be approximately 1500 words and should address the following question:  How have the different disciplines you have studied informed your understanding of the Hispanic World?  Consider both your personal and academic experiences and explain how they relate to your studies within this interdisciplinary major.”  (Hispanic Studies Distinction Guidelines)

For me, any reflection on my trajectory as a student of the Hispanic and Latin American world has to begin with the Spanish language. This language has been my gateway to that world, in the sense that it has allowed me to enter it and converse with its inhabitants in a more intimate way than could be possible without knowing anything of the language and all of the secrets, jokes, songs, and stories that it contains.

But the language was also my gateway in a different sense, a chronological sense, since it was the study of the Spanish language that steered me towards the content of the Hispanic world, so to speak. I say so to speak because language versus content is really a false dichotomy. Language and culture, as well as language and identity or language and power, are difficult concepts to tease out of one another, to separate, although I didn't know that when I began my study.

When I entered my first Spanish class, in middle school, it was as little more than just another requirement. In high school, Spanish became a favorite subject more because my friends were in the class than because the issues of the Spanish-speaking world particularly fascinated me. What content there was (to use that dichotomy) was seemingly overwhelmed by the interminable conjugation charts and vocabulary sheets, the maze of grammar that stood between me and comprehension. But the content was already sneaking in. While I struggled to remember almohada and azucar, Moorish Spain was leaving its mark on me. El maiz and la papa planted pre-Colombian America in my mind. And, of course, though I might not realize it until later, figures such as Guevara, Picasso, Neruda and Generalissimo Franco and other personalities of the Hispanic world began to populate my imagination.

         Travel and literature have been the two most enduring disciplines (an interesting term to use for both of those activities) through which I have interacted with the Hispanic world, and with which I have made myself a part of it. Spain is responsible for both. In Spain, on a short, three-week trip before beginning the beginning of my St. Olaf career, I learned many things, and, more importantly, I was exposed to the glaring reality that there were many more things I needed to learn. I immediately learned the limitations of a classroom knowledge of Spanish. I was lost amidst the rapid fire language and frustrated by my inability to communicate with my host family. I learned that mastering a language would take dedication and discipline. I began to read the national newspaper, El Pais, all the way through, every day. I collected magazines and books of poetry and began the daunting task of building my vocabulary.

I began to learn that the reward for dedication to a language is an intense satisfaction, much as a gardener feels at watching her tomatoes ripen throughout the summer. But unlike the tomato, a language is not consumed and then gone. My travel and reading filled me up, cada vez mas, with Spain: I read every day about the politics of the European Union and the growing dissatisfaction with the pro-war government of Aznar; I, like Borges, marveled at the Moorish architecture; I discovered Lorca. And, with a heavy heart at Franco's tomb, the fascist Spain that killed him.

Earlier I mentioned gateways. The Spanish language was my gateway to Spanish-language literature. And that literature was, in turn, my gateway to the vast compendium of politics, lives, revolutions, loves, philosophies and histories that make up the communal references and reference points of the Hispanic world. Where I have studied history or political science – and both of those fields have taught me much – their subjects have been accompanied by or subsumed into a larger, vibrant world of artistic expression which does not bother to clearly delineate itself from the intellectual, academic or political worlds.

The Hispanic world has given us Neruda, who moves effortlessly from describing his lover's body as a trembling blade of wheat to denouncing the brutality of the North American-owned mining companies. It has given us Orozco, whose muralismo, rooted in revolution, grappled with the human being in the face of a mechanical society, and the history of America as interrupted by Europe and the United States. It has given us Borges, who said that we are all citizens of Rome and searched for the intersection of memory and imagination that lies at the heart of our common humanity.

But even when I say "it has given us", I think that “it” and “us” is also a false dichotomy, or at least an imprecise one. Really the Hispanic world has given this richness to itself, not to us, and so when I take part in it, I am becoming part of it. It would be nonsensical to assert that there is not a sharp division between the United States and the Hispanic world, and especially Latin America. Yet when I read Marquez and Guillen in Spanish, I can't help but feel that I am becoming part of a community, a culture, a set of references, debates, and histories that does not transcend nationality but rather allows for a bleeding through and a blurring of national and regional identities.

Travel, to Spain, led to the beginning of my education in Hispanic literature. Literature would also lead to travel: when I chose a Latin America program I was, among other considerations, drawn to Chile as the country of Neruda. My semester in Chile, and my travels to Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, led to the same intellectual and cultural inundation that I had gotten a small but intense taste of in Spain. Political, historical, musical, linguistic and literary universes collided and synthesized. The abstract terms and events that I had studied in Spanish 254: Culture and Civilization of Latin America – neoliberalismo, golpe de estado, Salvador Allende, los Chicago Boys, democracia, marginalizacion – were being analyzed and debated in my university classroom, on morning talk shows, through the graffiti on the walls, and in the student assemblies that struck and marched, debated and marched some more.

Enrolling in a Chilean university was a gateway to a world of Latin American scholars and an intellectual discourse that was of the South and looking largely towards the South. That the university and its students accepted me and the other gringo students, that they brought me into their discussions, their marches, and their parties facilitated my immersion in that atmosphere. I found my academic interests gravitating towards Latin American history and political science; however, in the time-honored Latin American tradition, what I applied myself to inside the classroom did not remain too sharply removed from my extra-curricular pursuits. It is precisely that holistic, cross-discipline nature that I feel gives Latin American thought and artistic creation such energy, depth, and dynamism. In the Hispanic world, poetry is not telling the human story if it is not at some level engaged with the political struggles, economic hardships, and historical roots of its people.

Chile taught me that if I, as a student of political science, am interested in the Latin American state and the transition to democracy, I cannot remain aloof from folk music and the peñas (community cultural centers) that served as centers of resistance to dictatorship. After all, when Pinochet took power, one of his regime's first and very public victims was Chile's most famous folk guitarist, Victor Jara.

 Travel, and the disciplines – history, political science, literature, music, the culinary arts – that engaged me during and after my travels, also confronted me with some stark illustrations of the problematic aspects of my relationship with Latin America. The issue of US hegemony in the region was ever-present, as was that of the continual search for “authenticity” given the expansion of adventure-based tourism over the continent. What was I looking for in Latin America? Did I too, like the many thrill-seeking tourists I met, conceive of the region as a giant recreational park and its native peoples as quaint noble savages? What did my privilege mean to the people I met, spent time with, or bought souvenirs from? As for "Latin American Studies", is it just another form of imperialism to turn an entire region into an object of study?

There are, obviously, no easy resolutions to these questions. But I think I have been able to pinpoint, for me, the root of my uneasiness, which I think is the question of identity: am I a North American who is interested in Latin America, or am I in some measure a part of Latin America? Or are both regions a part of something larger? At every turn I have resisted the idea that Latin America is something I study, that I put under the microscope, at least any more than I put my own society under the microscope. I don't want to be an expert in Latin America like one is an expert in a certain branch of medicine, removed and authoritative; I want to be part of the debates, part of the literary, intellectual, and cultural community that sees as its forum all of the Americas, that doesn't transcend nations but synthesizes them.

Perhaps this is wishful thinking. Perhaps not everyone can be an Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean-American, straddling two worlds and choosing the best of both. But that, I think, is the best description my goal: to live as a citizen of the Americas as well as the world, and to help foment that ethic in my society. Mr. Dorfman’s message to those afraid of Spanish overtaking English is: don’t worry. You’re not losing Shakespeare, only gaining Cervantes.  Let me tweak that a bit for my fellow citizens of the hemisphere: we're not losing Washington – only gaining Bolívar.